At last!
I finally have an answer to that awkward question "So what is it that you do then?". "Why, as it 'appens, I'm a tech-enabled business zoomer!".
Guaranteed to pull with that one. Well, at least with Fi Glover anyway.
Posts by Dr Who
83 posts • joined Thursday 25th October 2007 07:30 GMT
Re: Got to love the titles here
Exactly! How is this an article? If I can get your username and password I can get at your stuff. In other news, the Pope has been outed as a Catholic and scientists have discovered that bears sh*t in the woods.
Somebody suggested having encryption, with a separate password, as a solution. Trouble is that this is open to the same ingenious attack vector. If I have your encryption pass phrase I can unencrypt your data - we're all doomed.
Groupgone
The business model has always been dodgy, and now they want to build an ecommerce platform for local businesses. No competition there then. Except for Amazon. And ebay. And probably Google soon.
FOSS
It seems to me that Tech City is trying to jump on the extraordinarily successful FOSS bandwagon. Trouble is, although they're getting there with the hippy communal cooperative side of things (sort of), they haven't got the awesome intellects and outstanding engineering skills that drive open source development. Lots of beards but no brains as it were.
It's a bit like having a bag of chips with no salt or vinegar. All you end up with is a cold, greasy pile of stodge (is that analogy stretched just a tad too far?).
WOPR
Never mind apostrophes. If it weren't for noughts and crosses, we'd have been wiped out a long time ago.
Posted in 'Fileless' malware installs into RAM
Re: Java? - Please, please, please
Sorry about the TLAs but I've always thought that anyone who's serious about IOS uses the CLI not the GUI ...
Intelligent client?
Like Richard Granger maybe? And they want to do all this in two years! A factor of ten out I suspect.
Finally ...
They've discovered the female erroneous zone.
You want good service levels. You deserve them. You are the customer.
Every minute this stuff is down will cost your business money. Your own customers will drift away and find another supplier.
Thinking about it, your hosting provider is serioulsy important. Your business could easily fail with downtime of this magnitude.
So why did you go and buy the cheapest pile of shite hosting service which for years has had a truly awful reputation for reliability, tech support and customer service? Eh ... answer me that one?
Please may I have some more sir?
From the Economist on the Groupon IPO :
"Groupon will lose $280m on revenues of $1.69 billion in 2011"
"Its business model is unpatentable and simple to replicate, so there are already more than 20 copycats."
"Its marketing costs are expected to be a painful $958m this year."
958 MILLION dollars on marketing in order to lose 280 million dollars.
This all smacks too much of the late 90s. Remember boo.com, a company which "spent $135 million of venture capital in just 18 months, and it was placed into receivership on 18 May 2000 and liquidated" (wikipedia)? But boy did they have some fun.
If a VIP goes on a trip to a dangerous place do you :
1) Publish detailed information about precisely when she will be where alongside details of your precise security strategy for each location, transit routes in between and security details during transit. Have all of this information scrutinised by an ad hoc network of independent security experts from around the world to see if they can find a vulnerability. At the same time of course, your adversaries get to scrutinise your plan too.
or do you :
2) Not announce the visit until it's already underway. Withold details of the trip from all but those who absolutely need to know, and even then tell them only those details that they need in order to do their job.
There is certainly a debate to be had. Option 2 could allow the security detail to get sloppy. However, I think when looked at this way, the answer isn't quite as obvious as it first seems.
The Unauthorised Biography
Can't we have a competition for the best sub-title. I'll start :
"An epic journey up my own ar*e"
Due diligence I'd say
You can't properly shaft someone without having done extensive penetration testing first.
So the cost has dropped from 4,915,200 pounds per gigabyte then to one or two pence per gigabyte now.
Looked at another way it would have cost about 25,000 pounds to store on photograph from my smartphone.
Blimey ...
Bored of luddites
Why would I want mains electricity when I can run my own generator?
Why would I want mains water when I can dig my own well?
Why would I want main drains when I can muck out my own cess pit?
Why would I want to set up VPN over the public Internet when I can lease my own line between London and New York for just £50000 a year?
The utility model is the future of computing. There is no conceivable argument to the contrary. The operational and economic cases are simply too strong. Ways are and will continue to be found to make the model as secure and robust as people need it to be. The technology will mature as all technologies do, with possibly a few minor and a couple of major catastrophes along the way. It has always been thus.
Luddites please go home - you are unbelievably boring.
Posted in Range Rover Evoque Si4
Prismatic screen eh? Nice ...
If it can travel through time, it's bigger on the inside than on the outside and it comes with a nubile assistant, I'll take two ...
Is Twitter the new religion?
In a secular age, Twitter may well become the opium of the masses. A source of meaning and third hand opinion for the vast majority who are unable to formulate their own. A crowd sourced priesthood.
Once you control what they think, making money's a piece of piss.
Hyper-hype
Ever wondered what the V in Hyper V stands for? Microsoft, already famous for its standard vapourware now brings us Hyper Vapourware, the ideal tool for making clouds, which are after all primarily vapour (plus a few pollutants).
@John G Imirie
That's patent bollox and you know it.
In the computing world at least, outsourcing is the oldest profession. In many circumstances it provides systems that are more reliable, more secure, and better performing than in house systems. Sometimes it can even save money, but that is not always the primary goal.
How it is implemented, both technologically and in terms of commercial agreements, is what makes the difference between successful and failed outsourcing. But that is equally true of in house systems.
Yes indeed
It's all down to a lack of attention to detail, which leads to prooly spilled wurds and hyphens where-there shouldn't be any!
Encryption
Easy. Just drop to machine code and Sven's your uncle.
Posted in Christmas shoppers hit by BT fire
Broadband
The thing is that the mult-million pound retailers use ten quid a month broadband connections to connect their POS systems to the world.
The way the broadband network is built it does not and cannot provide any kind of decent SLA. Anyone who thinks they can spend 10 quid a month, or even fifty quid a month and get rock solid connectivity is seriously deluded.
Posted in Trust and risk in the cloud
SME Too
Until now, the IT pioneers have tended to be large enterprises with big budgets. Eventually, some crumbs from their table would fall to small and medium sized businesses. The typical SME still thinks it's pretty good if they've got Sage Line 50 and an email server that's not down most of the time.
What the likes of Google, SalesForce, and the many more niche providers of multi-tenanted software are doing is turning the current situation on its head.
SMEs start with little or nothing. Moving to web based IT services provides them with things they've never had, and could never afford to provide in house. In using such services they can often end up with something superior to that which enterprise IT teams can offer with their in house services. Small business can end up with the latest and the greatest, whilst large enterprises risk falling behind.
In terms of line of business systems, the promise of the web was never to large enterprises. It has always been a promise to smaller businesses that they will finally have access to the kind of IT that only giants could previously afford.
For big business it is quite possible that moving their stuff to a third party service provider would not even save any money. Much in the same way as large companies run their own fleet of company cars, it will probably be cheaper for them to keep running their own IT services, albeit moving them to new and more efficient infrastructure.
What should scare big business is that for the first time many smaller companies are able to get access to cutting edge IT, enabling them to punch well above their weight. Up until now David has had a pea shooter. Now that he's been given a sling and some stones, he's much better equipped to go after Goliath.
Posted in Assange under fire from Wikileakers
Righteous chips
As long as they don't come with a bucket of salutary salt and a torrent of virtuous vinegar then that's fine.
You've got to admit, there is something extremely weird about the man when you see him interviewed.
Posted in Apathy kills Google's new-age Wave
Big shame
The really big idea behind Wave was federation of the platform. Increasingly we rely on monolithic platforms such as Google Apps and Facebook. With Wave, we could all run our own Wave servers but still communicate with each other, much as we do with email.
Sooner or later email must die. Something will need to replace it. Much as we don't want to rely on a single company to provide all of the world's email or DNS services, we won't want to rely on a single company to provide our messaging/collaboration services. Wave may not be the answer, but we will need something along similar lines.
Top Gun
They must be close, I'm getting an AARD on.
Posted in DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC!
Rose
Let's face it, most of the Tardis Totty is trash. That's why I was trying trying to get Rose back from the 10th dimension, and what happens? The bleeding Pervertrons hijacked the portal ... we're all in deep merde I'm afraid.
The sums do not add up
Pension plans like this are the ultimate Ponzi or Pyramid scheme. They will work for a few years, but are ultimately doomed to collapse - long after the people who made the promises have departed and probably died.
CO2
Any chemistry GCSE student can tell you that excessive gas emissions can easily be controlled by the use of a large bung.
This is more serious than you think
A police website *is* an operational system. This breach is serious. The hacker could have changed telephone numbers and the destination of any contact forms. People thinking they were contacting the police would instead be dealing with crooks who could abuse the misplaced trust with potentially serious consequences.
If the Reg were to be compromised that would be embarrassing but inconsequential. A compromised police website, whether or not it's connected to backend systems, is a serious problem.
Heretic!
Georgees, how dare you peddle such heresy on these distinguished pages!
Haven't you heard of open source?
Make money from your innovation and development work? You are living in a different universe mate.
Developers should develop for the love of it. Musicians should compose for the fun of it.
How vulgar can you get - making money indeed.
It is of course quite lucky for the open sourcers that the likes of Google, IBM and Sun have been willing to give generous handouts to all those developers who are working for free. They might have starved to death otherwise, but as it turns out it's been quite a nice little earner.
Live testing
Not being an insider, I'll take your mole's word that not enough testing was done. But how exactly would you live test this system? You can do stress tests, unit tests, simulate live transactions and all the rest, but you can't live test - it's a contradiction.
Posted in Vonage drops off the net
Not just price
I switched from Vonage to UK based outfit Voipfone when it looked like Vonage was going to go UTITs up a couple of years ago over patent disputes.
The main benefit of Voip for me is not price, but portability. Whether I'm in the office, at home, or abroad, I can have my office phone with me.
Before anyone mentions call divert or roaming mobile phone services they should gain a deeper understanding of how Voip works and how it is therefore significantly different from those two things.
Definition of success
I'll know that I've made it when I don't have to touch a keyboard or mouse all day, when I can turn off my mobile for 24 hours and not even think about it, when I don't need to wade through the torrent, made up largely of crud, which is my email/IM/Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter feed to find the few little nuggets which are actually worthwhile.
You have made it when you can chuck your technology out of the window and get a real life.
When you get old, I predict you will want to cross to the other side of the digital divide. It'll be your reward for the years of being a slave to the machine.
Horses for courses
You can probably group all the things you have passwords for into three categories :
1) Stuff you really really don't want anyone to break into (e.g. bank)
2) Stuff you'd rather people didn't break into (e.g. Facebook or LinkedIn)
3) Stuff you're not that bothered about (e.g ezines like the Reg or online electricity bill payment)
So now you only need three passwords. You also need a separate email address which you can use to receive password reminders for your category 1 stuff. You may as well give that the same password as your category 1 sites, because if someone cracks the email account they'll be able to get your password for the sites anyway.
Open standard
Wave is built on the XMPP protocol and the source code *will* be substantially open source. The idea is that, just as with an SMTP server or IMAP mail store, anyone will be able to implement their own server or client. That's why this is different and Google knows full well that it's the only way it can hope to get the technology into big corporations, which is essential if Wave is to stand even the remotest chance of replacing the ageing but ubiquitous email systems we have now.
Posted in Conficker borks London council
@ anon 13.21
This isn't about money or manpower, it's about basic housekeeping.
In my experience, both in the public and private sectors, IT departments consider it *way* beneath them to take care of the basics. There is nothing remotely exciting about tape archive management, trial restorations, AV and patch management and the like.
It is much better for your CV and for your credibility in general if you can talk about your strategy for leveraging the innovative power and opportunities of a hybrid virtualised storage infrastructure making best use of both private and hosted cloud architectures.
Come on, be honest, which would you rather impress the ladies with in the pub tonight? OK, neither I know, but you catch my drift.
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Call us now to get a free sample of our free music whilst you wait for Jane, our customer service representative, to get back from her lunch break.
Posted in Rackspace open-sources cloud APIs
@James
I've used a whole raft of hosting outfits and the only one that has been any good is Rackspace. In fact after four years of using them there is nothing bad I can say. Their motto is Fanatical Support and that's what they give you (no I don't work for them).
It's well worth noting that their Cloud Services are pretty much unique in offering any kind of meaningful SLA.
Finally, as far as I'm concerned the Reg can promote anyone they want to. Is there a law against that. You don't have to read it if you don't want to.
Have a good weekend James. I'm hoping you have at least one friend to spend it with.
Posted in Mobile Broadband just not fast enough
It's all in the question
Maybe the 10 percent who are happy think that mobile broadband means carrying your laptop around the house, connected either with a very long patch lead or preferably via WLAN. That can be the only explanation.
Jobs Worth
I used to know a bloke who was a backup tape changer. He'd wait for one tape to finish, then swap it with the next one. He didn't make much money through his work, but he made an awful lot through health and safety claims (excess noise in the data centre), huge amounts of sick leave caused by stress (what if the tape gets mangled) and claiming every out of hours or other benefit he could lay his hands on.
If the 40,000 that go are all the jobs worths then I for one would see it as one of few upsides of the recession.
@Stephan
So where do you currently store your stuff? Probably on your laptop, where it is arguably less safe than in the cloud. If you want to keep stuff private then encrypt it. After that it doesn't matter where you store it.
Not that insignificant
600 Mbps is 75 MBps which amounts to 264 GB per hour. Given that many hosting providers will have an outgoing bandwidth cap of 100GB per month per server, I wouldn't call that level of traffic insignificant for a single website of an insignificant party. Agreed it doesn't amount to a massive DDoS attack, but are you sure the bloke got his figures right?
He's right
I'm just back from my third week's skiing in the Alps this year. Without the mobile, the netbook and the interweb on the move I would have been lucky to get one. Mobile tech is enabling me to have a much bigger carbon footprint and to create a far bigger disturbance to the hibernating furry animals of the high alps.
Thanks Reg - for spoiling three of the best week's skiing I've had in years. Now I'm just on a huge guilt trip.
Posted in Any aaSes in your organisation?
@Jake
Of course it isn't rocket science. Technically it would be no problem at all.
My point is about capital outlay. Do it yourself and you've got some significant up front costs. By using storage providers, our storage costs become a revenue item i.e. a direct cost of sale as opposed to a large fixed overhead.
As a small business, particularly in times when loans are hard to come by, we could not afford the capital outlay required to build our own global infrastructure, therefore without the service providers our business would not be viable.
Posted in Any aaSes in your organisation?
Cloud storage
We are a small company providing a brand/sales collateral storage and distribution service to large companies. Our biggest problem is storage management. Storage as a service provides us with several benefits. Firstly we don't have to make large up front investments in storage infrastructure. Second we can scale the storage up and down instantly. Thirdly we can make use of the storage provider's caching capabilities to hold content near the consumer.
There is simply no other way to achieve our goals. Our business would not be viable if we had to build up a global distributed storage infrastructure ourselves.
What about reliability? Most of the storage providers have an SLA, but these don't amount to much. We therefore use several storage providers and data is replicated across them. Our software applications will try multiple locations in rotation when retrieving a given file. This mitigates the risk of a single storage provider being unavailable.
One way or another, software and infrastructure as a service will transform IT over the next few years. There are ways of retaining control and the cost benefits are too huge to ignore. Those companies that don't make at least some use of the technology will suffer or fail.
Must be a quiet news day
I agree with Dion. What on earth is this article on about? The change.gov site is not in any way sensitive. It doesn't collect personal information, the information on it is not sensitive, and it doesn't allow the public at large to post comments.
The very worst that could happen is that someone gains access to the CMS and posts an article. SSL won't prevent people trying to crack the password, but quite honestly, apart from a script kiddie, who would bother? There is I suppose a tiny risk of an XSS attack, but even that wouldn't be catastrophic.
Security is all about horses for courses. The sites referred to here do not demand a high level of security. It's not like it's the CIA's database of agents' details or something.
Posted in Half of Brits abuse apostrophe's
What's the plural of CV
If you have more than one cat, you don't write it as cat's. If you have more than one car you don't write it as car's. Why then do the vast majority of people insist on writing CV's instead of CVs. You can just about be forgiven for confusing it's and its, but why cock up a straight forward plural?
To boldly go ...
I sense lots of BOFHs worried about their jobs.
Whether your data is stored somewhere on the Internet or not, most businesses are already stuffed if they lose their connectivity. Even if your data is local, if your Internet connectivity fails you can't take or place orders, can't send or receive emails, and increasingly can't even get on your (VoIP) phone. Most business is already dependent on the cloud (or whatever you want to call it) whether they like it or not.
SaaS is already happening as will cloud storage. SLA, reliability, security, and regulatory compliance issues are either being dealt with or will be dealt with over the next year or two. There will be enterprise class storage service providers, probably delivered by IBM or EMC or Sun, as well as the consumer services delivered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
If you don't want to be dependent on a single storage provider, then use several. That's the beauty of it.
In five years, any business who is not using SaaS and cloud storage as part of its IT mix will be seriously uncompetitive. The cost advantages are just way to compelling.
I hate fads and hype. I hated dot com and I hate Web 2.0 BUT cloud computing, although I don't like the name, will transform the way IT is delivered. It's not new technology, it's just a new way of delivering old things.
I bet that when factory owners told their in house technicians that they were going to scrap their local generators and buy electricity from the national grid the techs told them they were mad. Cries of "But what if the power station fails, or the power cables are damaged, or the local substation blows up" must have been heard up and down the country.
Opinion
David McLeman
My 25 years of comical IT buzzwords
Tim Worstall
Time to take a sniff at the coffee, perhaps
Chris Mellor
Will they have to drag him back like last time?
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